Critic Reviews

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73

GameZone

If you are a fan of the Beach Head games you will most definitely enjoy this title. Plain and simple just aim and fire that’s about it! What this has that the others lack is a multiplayer option. Though it can only be played on a LAN, that’s more then what the others could do. For twenty bucks it’s a good deal.

Air Raid: This Is Not A Drill isn’t a terrible game, but with a narrow vision of gameplay, total lack of any story or compelling drama to carry you through 99 missions it is a pure arcade experience that most PC gamers have evolved out of a long time ago. If you still enjoy those classic arcade shooters of yesteryear and don’t mind spinning in circles shooting down hundreds, perhaps thousands of planes, then check this title out. There’s some fun to be had as long as you take it in small helpings.

Overall, Air Raid is begging for polish. It's fun in short spurts, but after 20 minutes or so, you've experienced everything the game has to offer. Granted, major hits like Pac-Man and Robotron counted on such familiarity, but this is certainly an acquired taste. You could do a lot worse for $20, but you can also do a lot better.

It’s bad enough that Beachhead 2000 (PCG rating: 18%), the first attempt to update Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum classic Beachhead, was so lousy. Now we’ve got Air Raid, which, while not a total disaster, barely even offers cosmetic upgrades to the 2000 version’s incredibly dull gameplay format.

Stare at a wall and scream that out at the top of your lungs 99 times in a row. Unless your arm is being torn out of your socket by a pissed off antelope, I guarantee you're having more fun than you would playing this. Air Raid is such a totally pointless, antiquated, poor excuse for an on-rails shooter it should be obliterated from the annals of history by a magical force. In fact, I expect such a thing will happen soon if I can only figure out how to get this bleeding spell book to work. I'd pay $20 for someone to come over and punch me in the penis before I'd willfully dish out my not so hard earned cash to a retail clerk for this, the game that should be tossed into a volcano.